Bloom The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel [Paperback]

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned--natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience--this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

Introduction: The Girl and the Water Lily
Chapter 1: Linn?us's Blooms: The Birth of the Botanical Vernacular
The Rise of Botanical Culture
The Mechanics of the Botanical Vernacular
Botanical Mimetics and the Novel
The Eighteenth Century: Occluded Blooms
Towards the Nineteenth Century: The Bloom Narrative
Chapter 2: Imaginative Literature and the Politics of Botany
Botany's Gendered Controversies
Botanical Modesty: Edgeworth's Belinda
Botanical Poetry: Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin
Chapter 3: Austen's Physicalized Mimesis: Garden, Landscape, Marriageable Girl
Lovers Walk: Burney's Evelina and Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Improving Grounds, Improving Complexions
Bloom: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion
Chapter 4: Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms
Ossification: Mid-Century Bloom in Dickens
Revivification: Mid-Century Bloom in Middlemarch and Adam Bede
Organic Realism: Eliot and Natural History
Chapter 5: Inside and Outside the Plot: Rewriting the Bloom Script in James
The Critic and Bloom
The Girl as Topic: Watch and Ward and The Awkward Age
A Blooming Consciousness: Thl3!